[ZoFreX]

Those aren't (all) personal preferences. Using superglobals is definitively bad, in the same way that using GOTO is. Not using PSR-0 autoloading is flying in the face of the community consensus and makes it much harder to use other libraries with CI compared to other frameworks.

Your point about PHP versions isn't very valid. 5.3 is over 3 years old now! Plenty of cheap hosts are far more up to date than that.

There is a difference between being "newbie friendly" (which I will admit, CI is - it's a lot easier to get into than say, Zend, by orders of magnitude) and "enabling bad practices". You could say that using mysqli and concatenating data into your queries is newbie friendly, and it is - it's a lot simpler conceptually than prepared statements, but that doesn't stop it being categorically a bad idea.

For the record my CI experience ended about 9 months ago, and I have contributed code to CI, so I feel that when I say certain parts of the internals are very badly coded I do have some valid perspective on that issue.